RadioTimes published a ranking of “The 60 Greatest Star Trek Moments Of All Time” on September 8, 2026, timed to the franchise’s 60th anniversary. The list, published under the outlet’s Currents Arts & Culture section, runs from the debut of The Original Series in 1966 through to Starfleet Academy, the newest entry in the franchise still awaiting release. RadioTimes says the feature was built to look back on “the franchise’s best moments” across six decades of television and film.
The timing isn’t incidental. Star Trek premiered on NBC in September 1966, and 2026 marks 60 years since that first broadcast. RadioTimes built its anniversary coverage around a countdown, a common format for franchise milestones, though in this case the list had to stretch further than usual to cover everything Star Trek has produced since Captain Kirk first took the USS Enterprise into open space.
The list spans six decades, from The Original Series’ 1966 debut to the upcoming Starfleet Academy
The headline sets the scope on its own: “from The Original Series to Starfleet Academy.” That phrase covers everything Star Trek has become since William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy first played Kirk and Spock. Between those two points sit The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, the J.J. Abrams film reboots, and the current streaming series, including Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks.
Starfleet Academy, at the far end of the list, is the franchise’s next entry rather than its most recent completed one. Including it in a “greatest moments” ranking suggests RadioTimes is treating the show’s arrival as part of the same 60-year timeline rather than waiting for it to air before adding it to retrospectives.
Why RadioTimes expanded its rankings from 50 to 60 entries for the anniversary edition
The current title, “The 60 Greatest Star Trek Moments Of All Time,” replaces an earlier version of the same feature that ranked 50 moments, a detail still visible in the source URL, which reads “the-50-greatest-star-trek-moments-of-all-time.” RadioTimes appears to have revised and expanded the piece for the anniversary, adding ten entries so the count matches the milestone being marked.
That kind of expansion is a common editorial move for anniversary content: round numbers get attached to round dates. A 50-item list works fine on its own, but a 60-item list tied to a 60th anniversary has a neatness editors tend to like when the numbers line up. It also gives RadioTimes room to add material from shows and seasons that debuted or continued after the original 50-moment version ran, without cutting anything from the earlier list.
What the ranking format signals about Star Trek’s franchise growth
From a single 1960s series to multiple concurrent shows and films
Star Trek launched in 1966 as one series with one cast and one starship. Sixty years later, the franchise runs several shows at once, includes theatrical films, and spans broadcast, syndication, and streaming: distribution models that didn’t exist when The Original Series first aired. A ranking that had to grow from 50 entries to 60 to properly cover the franchise makes the point plainly: there’s more Star Trek, in more formats, than a single countdown of any fixed length can comfortably hold.
Streaming-era additions changing what counts as a “great moment”
Putting Starfleet Academy and The Original Series in the same headline points to a second shift: streaming has changed how often new Star Trek arrives. Where the franchise once ran as a weekly network broadcast with seasons of 20-plus episodes, the streaming era has brought shorter seasons, faster turnaround between series, and entries built for platforms rather than syndication. RadioTimes treating Starfleet Academy as part of an anniversary retrospective before it’s even aired shows how closely current Star Trek production is tied to streaming release schedules, rather than to the older pattern of a show running for years before its legacy gets judged.
How the list fits into 2026’s Star Trek anniversary coverage
RadioTimes’ ranking is one piece of what the 60th anniversary generated across entertainment media in 2026. Anniversary years for long-running franchises tend to produce a wave of retrospective content, rankings, oral histories, cast interviews, reissues, clustered around the milestone date. The RadioTimes piece, published September 8, 2026, fits that pattern, using the countdown to mark six decades of a franchise that started as a single NBC series (canceled, then revived) and grew into one of television’s biggest fictional universes.
RadioTimes frames the piece as a look back at “the franchise’s best moments,” which makes it a retrospective rather than a critical assessment. The list doesn’t rank shows against each other by quality. It collects standout scenes, episodes, and beats across the franchise’s history, judging each era on its own terms rather than measuring 1966 television production against 2026 streaming values.
Where to read the full ranking and what it means for fans revisiting the franchise
The complete list is on RadioTimes’ website under its Currents Arts & Culture section, at the URL originally published for the outlet’s Star Trek moments feature. For fans, the value of a list like this isn’t really the order, arguments over whether one scene belongs above another are inevitable and not the point. The value is the shape of the thing: 60 entries across 60 years work as a rough map for where to start (or restart) a rewatch, especially for viewers who came in through one era, say Discovery or Strange New Worlds, and never went back to The Original Series or The Next Generation.
Since the list already reaches forward to Starfleet Academy, a show that hadn’t aired at the time of publication, it’s worth treating the ranking as something that will keep changing rather than a fixed document. RadioTimes has already revised its own count once, from 50 to 60, within this anniversary cycle. Anyone using the list as a rewatch guide should expect it to keep growing the way the franchise itself has, one new series at a time, for as long as Star Trek keeps making moments worth ranking.
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